Exoplanets are exotic worlds orbiting distant stars far beyond our solar system. Ever since the first ones were discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have turned their attention to these distant worlds to understand more about them. Now, for the first time, scientists have detected radio signals coming directly from one of these planets, a massive gas giant named β Pictoris b.

Previous radio detections from exoplanetary systems couldn’t be traced directly to the planet itself because astronomers couldn’t tell whether the signal came from the star or the planet. And no, this isn’t evidence of alien life communicating with each other. The radio waves come from auroras linked to the planet’s powerful magnetic field.

Auroras can occur when high-energy charged particles travel along a planet’s magnetic field lines and interact with its upper atmosphere. On Earth, for example, this produces the northern lights.

The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. Were nature’s constants even slightly different, life wouldn’t exist. To explain this, scientists reach for bizarre ideas, like an infinite multiverse. But physicist and technologist Jeff Shainline thinks we’ve been missing a crucial clue. The universe isn’t just fine-tuned for life, but also for the creation of technology – humanity itself is just one step in this longer evolutionary process. He uses this observation to build a new case for an overlooked explanation of fine-tuning: Lee Smolin’s proposal that universes reproduce through black holes and, like organisms, evolve across cosmic generations towards fecundity. Life and technology, Shainline argues, are not the point of the universe, but parts of its reproductive strategy.

A deep puzzle has loomed over physics since the 1950s. The world we observe—from sub-atomic quarks to lightyear-spanning galaxies—has the properties it does because a short list of numbers takes certain values. These numbers are often referred to as constants of nature (I will refer to them as parameters), and they include quantities like the speed of light, the masses of fundamental particles, and the strengths of the fundamental forces. The puzzle arises because these numbers have very special values that allow life to exist. This is called fine-tuning. As an example, life depends on carbon, and carbon is made in stars. But the specific process by which carbon is made in stars is extraordinary, relying on a very peculiar coincidence of properties involving electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong nuclear force that causes alpha particles to fuse into carbon nuclei.

What happened in the first moments of the universe—before the building blocks of life and the world we know today came into existence? Physicists at the CERN research facility in Switzerland are trying to answer this question by recreating some of the extreme conditions that prevailed in the universe during its earliest history. Now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration, have come one step closer to understanding those conditions.

At CERN, researchers can make atomic nuclei collide at almost the speed of light, creating tiny droplets of the primordial matter that filled the universe during its first millionth of a second. This matter is known as quark-gluon plasma and is thought to have been the earliest form of matter in the universe.

For many years, scientists have assumed that creating this plasma required collisions between very heavy atomic nuclei such as lead. But physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute have now succeeded in creating the primordial matter by smashing the much smaller nuclei of oxygen-16 and neon-20 together.